Hi All,I've been working on this last year. We (me and MeerKAT software people here in South Africa) had a conference call with the NRAO people last year, where we discussed the current (poor) state of CASA. I'm not sure what is the state of CASA at the moment, since as far as I know development mostly happens in the states and there is no public bug tracker, mailinglist or forum.I think what you all should know is:* They acknowledge the problems with casa and want to improve the state of CASA. We here in South Africa would create Debian packages, or at least get everything working on Debian and let it use the system Python (not the bundled one)* CASA forked casacore, or the other way around. That was a bad idea, and effort is being done to undo this. CASA specific changes are merged back into the google code casacore repo and casa is (going to be?) adjusted to work with the google code one.* CASA uses its own python and much more packages. I managed to get most of the stuff working with the system python, but many parts of the code depend on an ancient version of IPython. Only solution I see here is to update CASA to make it work with a more recent IPython.* The not finished work in progress results of my packaging effort can be found here:I've created issues and patches for most of the problems I encountered, see the issues trackers of the repo's. This was all thrown back over the fence to NRAO, plan was that they where going to be evaluated and put in the tree or not. I have no idea what the status of that is.I'm back in South Africa now, and the idea is that I'm going to spent some time again on this. Probably somewhere this month I'll have a talk with NRAO people and MeerKAT developers here, I think it is good to get you people involved (if you want) and get everybody heading in the same direction.greetings,- Gijs2014-10-05 3:00 GMT+02:00 <heroxbd@gentoo.org>:Hi Sergio,
I guess you wouldn't mind to get a reply to the list.
Sergio Gelato <Sergio.Gelato@astro.su.se> writes:
> * heroxbd@gentoo.org [2014-10-04 23:04:48 +0900]:
>> CASA downloaded from
>>
>> http://casa.nrao.edu/casa_obtaining.shtml
>>
>> is scary. It extracts to 2.4GiB and integrates:
>>
>> 1. casacore
>
> The last time I looked at it (CASA 4.0.1) this was a fork of casacore
> with enough API differences from the Google-hosted version to make
> it completely impractical to switch.
Even more scary.
> I didn't complete my packaging effort for lack of time. (I had already
> packaged casacore --- for internal use so I didn't have to worry as much
> about licensing issues as one must for inclusion into Debian proper.)
You might have already seen my post. Would you like to have a look at
https://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/debian-astro/packages/casacore.git
https://mentors.debian.net/package/casacore
http://mentors.debian.net/debian/pool/main/c/casacore/casacore_1.7.0-1.dsc
to check if any feature was missing compared to your internal package?
>> 2. boost
>> 3. qt4
>> 4. python + numpy + matplotlib + ipython
>
> Yes, astronomical software distributors have this tendency to bundle a whole
> environment, causing headaches for those researchers who want to write, say,
> Python glue around tools from multiple sources. (Which bundle's Python
> interpreter shall they use?)
That's a sad state. And that's the opportunity an astrophysical Debian
blend fits into the picture.
>> - has anyone tried to substitute the bundled libraries with those from
>> the OS?
>
> I've looked into switching to "Google's" casacore and concluded it would be
> way too much work. I hope that the developers of CASA haven't modified Boost,
> Qt or Python to nearly the same extent.
Hope so.
>> - has anyone tried to compile casa from scratch, like documented in
>>
>> https://safe.nrao.edu/wiki/bin/view/Software/CasaDevUbuntu ?
>
> I've tried to compile it from scratch, had to fix a few bugs that were
> causing compile-time errors but nothing really major. Still, that made
> me wonder how they had managed to generate their binaries; I doubt they
> could have used the source code exactly as tagged in the repository.
Or these is only one in the team who knows how to make a release
manually.
> I didn't complete the project due to other, more pressing/rewarding
> tasks.
Do you have something intermediate to share? Maybe a note on how to
compile, what to patch, or just a build log?
>> We might at least strip off the bundled libraries to persuade upstream
>> to release lighter weight tarballs.
>
> Persuading upstream? I wouldn't hold my breath. There is a logic to this
> madness of bundling everything: it makes support easier for them. Maybe
> if one were to fund them…
He who bundles everything want to make their tarball insensitive to the
host environment. That's poorman's "portability". And that makes
packaging such a nightmare so that there is no distribution shipping
their software. And They have to bundle even more.
We might be able to do something to this endless loop. But I am not
sure if it worths the time.
Cheers,
Benda
--Gijs Molenaar
http://pythonic.nl